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Catalog Updates: Multiple Options and Categories
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Over the last year we have been making updates to the catalog and other E-commerce features of EZ-NetTools in several steps. In the near future, we are planning to make a major upgrade to the catalog. The next set of upgrades will be to allow multiple and varied options for products and to allow products to be in more than one category. As of the middle of July 2003, we are hoping to make these features available at the end of August of 2003.
New catalog and order pages
In the member tools, the links to maintain the catalog will be combined and will have a different look. The EZ-Catalog and EZ-Order links will be combined.. The new page will look like the EZ-Checkout pages.
Multiple product options
The first feature upgrade will be to provide more options for products. An example of an option would be a color or size for a shirt. The current tools allow for options but only in a limited way. The planned upgrade will provide for the following functions.
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The number of options per product will not be limited to two. For example, a shirt may have options of color, size, material, and sleeve length. A customizable product such as a business card might have options of name, street address, city, state, zip code, phone, fax, and email. Currently, you can have one, two or no options.
Different options for each product. For example, size and color for one product and style, year, and make for another product. Currently, all products must have the same options.
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Ability to define what options are valid. For example, the valid colors are red, green, and blue. Currently, you cannot specify what are valid options.
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Price of a product can vary by option. For example, XX large could have $2.00 premium. This feature is new.
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The picture to be displayed could vary based on the option selected. For example, if red is selected for a jacket, the picture could change to show a red version of the jacket. This feature is new.
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There will a number of ways to display the options on the catalog and price list pages, including a drop down list for options like size and color. This feature is new. Over time, more display options are anticipated.
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There are other, less noticeable changes as well. We feel that these changes will be immensely helpful to many of our customers.
Multiple categories
When these changes become effective, a product will be able to belong to more than one category. For example, a purse may be listed under accessories like normal but could also be included in a category of Mother's Day Specials. Another example would allow a book to be listed in three different categories: author, publisher, and genre. The current system only allows a product to be associated with one category.
Problems with import and export
Many of the underlying capability for both of these features have been available since last year. For example, multiple product options has been available for those with some programming abilities and a very specific situation for over 12 months. The changes to the database that were made last Fall provided for putting products in multiple categories. One of the biggest hurdles to implementing these changes are related to the import and export process.
The additional options and multiple categories make the import and export process significantly more complicated. We continually face the challenge of adding features while keeping the tools true to their name, EZ. Initially, we were going to delay adding these features until we had solved the problems with import and export. However, many of our customer felt a great need for these features now. Therefore, we decided to make these enhancements first. The implication is that THE MULTIPLE OPTIONS AND CATEGORY INFORMATION CANNOT BE IMPORTED NOR EXPORTED. To restate, if you choose to use either the new options or the multiple categories, importing a database will remove these options. The export will not export this new data. Thus, if you will use these features, you should not import or export your catalog data.
In the future, we will enhance the import and export process to handle these new features. The new import and export will likely be more complicated than the single file upload that is currently used. We will also keep a simple import for those whose catalog remains simple and does not require these new features. By providing two important methods we hope to be able to accommodate both those who needs advanced features and those who want an easy system.
Future enhancements
As mentioned above, after these updates have been completed, we will enhance the import and export to accommodate these features. Subsequently, we will make the following upgrades:
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- Provide for subcategories. For example, a clothing category could be further broken down in to mens, womens, and children. These categories might be further divided into shirts, pants, shoes, coats, and accessories and so on.
- We plan to provide more flexibility in how the category and product pages can be displayed.
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